


Pacific Swells

by evil bunny wolf (evil_bunny_king)



Series: you make me feel so criminal [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, Frank POV, in which Frank tries to comprehend Karen Page, with debatable success
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:02:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7050046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil%20bunny%20wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not morbid curiosity. She’d be easier to scare away, if it were – he could play the part, flog away another shred of his humanity to dangle before her and ask ‘is this what you wanted? This what you wanted to see?’</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Small and petty gods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pre-S1 Punisher

He reads Karen’s articles in the grey of the morning, when the sky's just starting to crack open and the spaces between words are easier than watching the minute hand of the clock. He doesn’t read all of them - hell, he doesn’t even read them in the right order, and sometimes he wonders why he does it, why he keeps them, why he lets the papers stack up in the corner. Take a step, make a decision - it’s the kind of certainty he’d sworn by, once. If you’re gonna do it, you do it.  
  
He does, and he doesn’t. Shit stacks up. He gets a box, eventually.  
  
Curt’s a good man. Their evenings, their chats, they become routine, and books start appearing in the spaces in his apartment: Moby Dick on the chair, Fitzgerald in the corner; Woolf by the bed, right by the papers.  
  
_“I leant over the edge of the boat and fell down, he thought. I went under the sea. I have been dead and yet am now alive.”_  
  
Falling, sinking, the sea, where the sand presses back against the soles of your feet and there's noise and there's water and you’re thinking, you must be dreaming to find water in a desert like this - but it's not, you're home, and it's your kids around you, and your hands are empty, curling around thin air. It feels like a dream, the way time passes and it doesn't. Reality so thin you can slip through it like a knife.  
  
There are words and there are mornings, of sorts. There are whales in the plaster and the dead speak to him through the walls, tracing their fingers over the curve of his ear.  
  
“What’d you think?” Curt asks when Frank hands back the latest, a memoir from a self-professed sex addict. “Crock of shit right?”  
  
He fixes him with a long, hard look, one that only makes Curt’s grin wider. “Yeah,” he says, “crock of shit’s the tip of the iceberg,” and Curt starts laughing and then he’s laughing too, the sound bubbling up, like the throes of a drowning man. “What the fuck are you getting me to read, Curt?”

Curt claps him on the shoulder, firm, familiar. “Makes you think of Billy, right?”  
  
He shakes his head, smiling like an asshole. “Shut up. I swear, the best part of it was when he almost got stabbed.”  
  
When the chairs are all folded up and the room is locked behind them they linger in the hall, two cups of cold coffee between them. Curt takes a good look at him then, long and close and then he sighs, leaning back against the wall.  
  
“You see, Frank,” he says. “All of this, shitty literature, everything - that’s just the crux of it. ‘Normal life’, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It can be all shit and nonsense, as well as everything else and that, that’s one of the hardest things to get used to again. To learn how to do again. There are new rules. Different perspectives. But you do, Frank; you do adjust.”  
  
Frank rounds the cup in his hands, looking down at it, tapping his index finger against the rim. There’s that, that heaviness in his chest, the feeling that's never really gone, that never really goes away. “I don’t have a ‘normal life’ anymore, Curt,” he says, carefully. He had one before. He lost them. They’re not coming back.  
  
“Yeah, I know,” Curt says, just as quietly. “But you still have a life.”

Frank looks at him a moment, and then glances away. “Yeah,” he says, and drains the coffee and Curt gives him a look, one that tells him he knows what he's thinking, that he's not falling for his bullshit. They leave it at that for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the following are sometimes contradictory oneshots that continue this narrative, written over the last two years. I've thrown a couple of prompts in there as well (prompts won't become part of the verse)


	2. Chapter 2

Day in and Maria’s fingers walk the familiar path down behind his ear.

Day in and there’s sand in his mouth and gritted into the sheets and his eyes are stinging, stinging in the desert heat. There’s a hand between his shoulder blades, where his pack should be. There are fingers smoothing up, curling, dragging in the hair of his nape, and her voice in his ear - _wake up, sleepy head-_

 

-

 

He kicks away the blankets and bends back the cover of the Fitzgerald so far he hears the spine crack.


	3. Post-deployment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘Worth it,’ she’d laughed, breathless and beautiful, ‘to see you roar, tiger’.

They’re in the kitchen singing to some [cheesy song from the 80s.](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FmcUza_wWCfA&t=NTI0Y2EzZDExMzc3NWQyMDAzNWMzZDg0N2RmYjQ0N2E1NDQwMWRlNCxLbmpXTkliZA%3D%3D&b=t%3AW06Ei_hyv0lbEF7Rn2G-Jg&m=1)

He can’t quite see them. He’s in the living room, crashed out on the couch, watching the picture flicker on the screen - there’s a game on, football; he’s not watching, he’s turned the sound real low. His mind’s filled with - nothing. Smoke, maybe. He’s sitting there and it’s almost like he’s not there at all.

He can hear them, though. The tap of her wooden spoon on the counter, the kick of Lisa’s little baby shoes against the cabinet. Maria cranks the music a little higher for the chorus, pitching her voice low as if she’s singing to Lisa, trying to get her to join in. Shit, it’s that crazy lovecat song she made them play at the wedding. The one with the moaning, the _meowing_ \- she’d hardly been able to sing it for laughing; she’d chipped her manicure on his dress blues pretending to scratch him.

‘Worth it,’ she’d laughed, breathless and beautiful, ‘to see you roar, tiger’.

Now, he hears Lisa giggle. She’s meowing out of tempo and loudly, slapping her hands on the counter and Maria’s laughing the same way she always has, with abandon, warm just beyond the kitchen door.

He could go join them. He sees himself doing so: sees himself picking his feet up and hauling his ass in there, hooking Maria on his arm. He’d brush Lisa’s forehead and press a kiss against her little curls, his own save for the colour (that was all Maria’s); draw the woman herself in and give her a bite to remember this by, smile into her neck when she squirmed.

He sits there and he can see this; they are so damn close, and all he needs is to just-

The song ends.

A country ballad comes on, something new, from when he was in country, and Maria turns it down, shuffles across the kitchen. Lisa babbles something just beneath the edge of hearing. Yells when she doesn’t get the response she wanted and is soothed by a couple words, and then the house returns to the clatter of pans, Maria humming, occasionally, in the silence.

He sits there in front of the TV and watches the images flicker by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Housekeeping - sorry for the additional notifications! also i should not be allowed to moderate my AO3 because I'll have crises of confidence and take stories down, have instant and intense regret and worry about when to put them back up for an age... at least I can change the posting date eh?


	4. Chapter 4

Frank has a million fucking thoughts about Karen Page.

For one: she’s damn persistent. No matter how dangerous a lead is, or how pure, goddamn stupid it is to follow it, she’ll be the first person in there- the one who leans in, fingers splayed across the plexiglass. He can't count the times he’s seen her in the weeks since the woods - hovering at his crime-scenes, that blond hair and latest iteration of a work blouse flashing red and blue in police lights. Shit, he’d think she was following him if it weren’t for the times she’d gotten to a place first, staked it out in that piece of crap car she’d somehow fixed after he’d totalled it.

She’s like a tick, like a burr. Like an itch he just can’t reach crawling away beneath the skin.

It’s not morbid curiosity. She’d be easier to scare away, if it were – he could play the part, flog away another shred of his humanity to dangle before her and ask ‘is this what you wanted? This what you wanted to see?’

But she, naw, she’s not in it for the spectacle. She’d take one look at his bloodied hands and haul herself closer, look him in the eye, as if she can peel him apart with a single glance, as if she’d blink and see the mess that was once Frank Castle.

She’d thought she’d had him pegged. That she could see something in him, understand something, and sometimes, he’s not entirely sure that she was wrong.

But that was before. That was before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So these are all set in my 'Author our own disasters' verse. This one is pre-story, post-season 2.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karen Page writes histories of the ruins of Frank Castle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-Season 2, following from the first chapter.

He was dead to her. He was dead, period. Supposed to be a relief, to have that last connection severed; supposed to let him focus, and it was. He had.

But sometimes, when he’s not paying enough attention - when the city’s gone quiet, breathing in those brief moments of peace - he finds himself wondering about how she sees him now.

It’s not like she’s made herself easy to forget. Shit, he’s certain now that she actively chases after his crime scenes, taking the time to write her articles on him between her usual blogging and the grunt work of a minor reporter. He even reads them, sometimes. Not often. Rarely finishes them. But sometimes he’s at a diner or something and there’s a Bugle left in his booth, covered in coffee stains and food, and so he flicks through it to her section (pages 6-7, between the fashion column and the usual crap about the mayor).

She’s both kinder than she should be, and fucking brutal. She lets him stay dead with bullshit about copycats but then she just won’t let his corpse lie - she whips up a mirror to his misdeeds, showing him just how much he’s changed. She has a way of pulling out details he hadn’t even noticed.

And yeah, he is colder, these days. Numb. The snarl of rage and pain is that little bit quieter in the back of his skull and with each lead Micro slips him he feels more familiar with that, with that strange kind of silence. He can be the Punisher, if he needs to be. Too easy, almost. He no longer cares. He's not sure when exactly he stopped.

She makes a _history_ outta of it though. Fixes on all those little differences, what he’s losing and forgetting between one month and the next, and with each article he brings himself to read it’s like a bloodless vivisection, a splaying of his guts out for him to see, as if he could live like that, as if he could live knowing that. But he was dead already, wasn’t he? Dead and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care and - he closes the paper.

He reaches for his burner. Texts micro for updates on the latest target, slipping back into calculation and planning and it’s as nice and easy as it should be to be swallowed whole like this: the direction behind the bullet. Purpose, effect.

He leaves after his second mug of coffee and leaves the tip beside his empty plate. He leaves the paper behind too.


	6. Chapter 6

Tonight, Frank dreams of fire.

He’s sat there in the middle of his living room, surrounded by their things, their faces on the walls and flames lick from his feet across the sofa and up the legs of the piano. Memories disintegrating in instants: Maria’s mother’s coffee table, the kids’ clay sculptures - and somehow he remembers that this isn’t how it happened, that he didn’t see this, he couldn’t have seen this, but if it feels so damn real, does that really matter?

He cannot leave, not that he tries. He can only watch as he destroys what remains of his family - because he’s the one that’s burning, this time; he’s the one in flames, taking them all down with him.

He sits there until the timbers cave in around him.

 _It needed to be done, they’re already dead, why would it matter to them anymore_ , all those excuses, they crumble into bullshit when he’s watching his family’s house burn.

When he wakes he's tangled up in his sweaty sheets.

He sits up and knuckles the sleep from his eyes. The air of the little one-bed he’d rented with cash on hand is thick in the summer evening, and somehow it still tastes like smoke, so he stalks out of bed with a grunt to close the window, heat be damned.

He sees the flare of embers through the blinds. A breath of smoke curling against the street lamps, dirty orange in the light.

Neighbour’s on the fire escape, smoking.

Figures.

He drags the window shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this rate I should re-title this: Broody McBrooderson broods. This one's in-verse, but nonspecific.


	7. You are a terrible liar

The first time they meet by the river she has an expression that he recognises - like a storm coming in, tide drawn back until all that’s left on the shore is the shit and the bones left in the mud.

She leans on the railing, not quite close to him but not far either. She looks out at the waves, and it’s like he can feel the swell coming, thick like spray on the breeze.

“What do you want, Frank?” she says to the smudge of Manhattan, grey and wet across the bay. Her hands tighten around her elbows and she almost turns her head to look at him, but stops herself before she can. “It’s been months since I- since we last saw each other. For all I knew, you were dead. So why now?”

“I need your help.”

The silence sticks a moment. Her shoulders go up. “And?”

“And yeah, I know I don’t deserve it, but you’ve been digging anyway. You found Russo.”

“He found me,” she corrects over her shoulder, and he shrugs and leans forward on the rail as well, until he can trick himself into thinking he can feel the spray.

“I knew him.”

She snorts. “Yeah, I know.”

“Yeah.” He turns his gaze to her and keeps it there until she shifts on her feet, maybe embarrassed, probably just angry, and then looks out again. An acknowledgement, at least. She still won’t look at him. He sees a pair of seagulls riding the wake of a ferry boat. “Thought you were gonna let that go.”

She rolls her eyes and finally turns towards him, fixing him with an incredulous look. “Yeah, Frank, I think you lost any right to an opinion on what I do or not do a long time ago-”

The irritation he’d felt when he’d recognised her, when he’d seen her and Russo stumbling from the wreckage of Billy’s apartment, ticks up. “It’s not your fight. You think you know what this is, but you don’t-”

“I know it’s bigger than us, Frank. I may not have the pieces yet, but I know that. I’m doing my job.” She runs her hands through her hair, roughly, and then lets them fall to her sides exasperatedly. “Is that why you’re here? To pull this patriarchal bullshit-?”

“No, it’s not. I need your help.”

She laughs again. “My help. Really.”

He looks at her, nice and long, and the defensive tension in her shoulders falter, just that little bit.

He’s changed since he last saw her. He’s rougher, hiding in plain sight behind a beard and too-long hair he itches to shave and he’s not who he was when she knew him last; he’s come too far, done too much, for that.

She tips her head back towards the sky to think, though. It’s then that he sees the knife wound, curling around the edge of her jaw - shallow, but long, a half-smile that just misses the artery and she reaches for it as if she can feel his gaze, fingers hovering over the scab.

Don’t, her eyes warn him, and so he doesn’t, as much as he feels his fingers twitch, and after a long moment she starts to relax, her hands returning deliberately to her sides.

“Alright.” She runs her hands through her hair as she says it, as if she can’t really believe what she’s agreeing too. She looks at him now, though, really looks, and something about it makes him wonder if he’s doing the wrong thing, as much as the world seems more solid for it. “Alright.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is effectively Frank's POV from the first chapter of [author our own disasters](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6560539/chapters/15009202) (although it deviates) but it works on its own, too.

She looks at him and she tells him she’s not going anywhere.

It’s fucking moronic. Insane. This is a level of shit she hasn’t quite comprehended yet and yet she’s firming her jaw in that mulish way of hers and facing him down, head on, fingers clenching tight around the torch and making the light dance across the flooring.

She’s in a pair of pink fucking running shoes. He doesn’t think he’s seen her out of heels, before.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he mutters, his grip slip-sliding across the machinery he’s clinging on to. He’s barely on his feet and his head pounding like there’s a mallet rattling around in there but he’s not going to let her know it. He won’t look at her. He focuses instead on keeping his feet beneath him. The floor buckles like the swells before a storm.

Her hands shake and shadows skitter across their feet in waves.

“Maybe so,” she says, slowly, deliberately. “Maybe I am. But Frank-” And then she’s stepping in front of him, settling her hands on his and digging her fingers in, holding him there. “Frank, I’m all you’ve got. So unless you feel up to crawling, you’re stuck with me, buddy. Buck up. Get used to it, because if we’re getting out of here, we’re getting out together.”

He stares at her a moment. At her and her pink sneakers, her old-lady slacks, all elasticated at the waist and bagging around her thighs: the legal assistant, the junior reporter, in too deep once again.

But she, she doesn’t take her eyes off him for a moment. She watches him and she waits, as if she knows what he’ll choose and all of a sudden he gets this feeling of being pulled apart, pulled open.

 _You’ve got a death wish,_ he wants to say. “Some pair we make,” comes out instead, and like that her expression fractures, the warmth of a smile reaching him before she can glance down and away. The floor rocks again.

“Yeah, Frank.” she says, to the torch in her hands. “Yeah, we’re the dream team. Get up.”


	9. Carousel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another look at the final carousel scene, Punisher S1

“I got you, I got you.”

It’s like a dream. He sits there on the edge of the carousel and the lights are still going, the horses; Madani’s bleeding out in his hands, and he’s still here.

He’s still here.

He presses his hand against the entry wound. He checks, automatically: no exit wound registers somewhere, as if he’s saying it to someone else, as if it’s far away. He doesn’t see the kids until they’ve levered themselves down beside him. He sees the girl’s hair against his arm, so different from his baby girl’s; sees blood welling between the splits of her fingers and then he’s somewhere else again, he’s nowhere, and it’s quiet, beneath the click of the motor.

There are sounds in the distance, getting louder. Sirens, lights; they’re coming for them, coming for both of them, him and Bill, and that’s alright, he thinks. That’s alright.

When they come, he goes easy.

He only really feels it when they pry Madani from him, hand by bloodied hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both interestingly and annoyingly, this collection shows how the way I write Frank has evolved over the last year. Unfortunately, that means I now hate the earlier pieces and must use Everything In My Power to not let myself touch them (strength Kate)


	10. I belong to you now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "I belong to you now"

"I belong to you now," Karen says.

Frank looks at her hard when she says it. Or rather, he looks at her mouth. Where they’re sitting, it’s intimate - she’s close enough that he can see the stir of his breath in her hair, the way a strand catches on her lipstick.

He watches her mouth so closely he can almost taste the words.

She’s like a wraith in the dirty light of his apartment. Her knees are tucked in almost against his, the sheets of the cot rucked around their bare feet.

“That what you want?” he asks, but it’s not really a question.

It’s clarification. Permission.

He draws his gaze back to her eyes and holds it there, and he doesn’t touch her

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tossing a bunch of fragments in here because I'm kicking around with my longer stuff at the moment and it's infuriating....!


	11. Orbituary: Karen Page

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Karen's dead.

Karen Page made her own choices. She was reckless, she saw too much and dug deeper and she knew that, she knew what that could cost, and she did it anyway. He understands that. Understands that to an extent this outcome was inevitable but still, but still-

_She's not coming back._

It hurts, but not like it did the first time. He’s- colder than that, too gone for that, but it’s still like somethings been torn from what’s left of him and he hits rage and he stays there, stays there for a long time.

He brings a new war to New York City and it doesn’t help.

He knew it wouldn’t. He does it anyway.

-

(He wasn't there when Maria and the kids were buried. He wasn't out of it for long before the Reyes managed to get his life support turned off, but with the chances so slim-

Some relatives of Maria's came up, her parents, to see to the arrangements (he was never too close to them; away too much for that) and the ceremony was beautiful, they'd told him, after. A little gathering in the local chapel, community turn out, lots of kind words. Little plot all together near this big oak, where the shadows of its fingers reached them at dawn, trailing over the headstones.

He knows that because that's how he found them again the morning after he woke up.)


End file.
